For Writers Quotes

While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I'm drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there.

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

I write to believe in goodness.

He'd heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns drinking champagne. This is, of course, absolutely true.

It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

An introspective man who doesn’t keep a diary consigns himself to a special hell

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.

To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.

Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea.

Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

Thought flies and words go on foot.

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.

Any good writer is going to be well-received and is going to not be well-received; that's how you know you're a great writer.

I learned that famous writers are people with foibles like anyone else and this helped me realize reaching their level of notoriety wasn't impossible.

The bottom line is that female writers aren't being given enough opportunities by male producers.

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

Young writers take themselves very seriously in college.

For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.

Today it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga.

I was clasified as a 'Science Fiction' writer simply because I wrote about Schenectady.

He was so good at everything he did. You can't call Ronnie Barker a comedian. He was an actor, and a great writer.

Good writers touch life often.

Hackle may be the best absurdist story writer working today.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

Mediocre writers borrow; great writers steal.